Posts with tag mike

Change comes a lot in this game. Some changes are small, and some are big. Some changes players hate at first, and then they learn to live with and even like them. But some changes are simply and totally unacceptable. And of course when I say that, I mean the change to the male Orc shoulder size.

We male Orcs are especially proud of our powerful, broad shoulders. I love my shoulder pieces-- I once ran UBRS countless times (and I do mean countless times-- just ask my guild, who I dragged through with me) just to get the Pauldrons of Elements. We have broad, towering, expansive shoulder armor, and we are respected, loved, and feared because of it. Your male Orc Warlocks, your Warriors, your Shamans, Rogues and Hunters all stand proud knowing that each of our shoulder pieces is as big as our head.

Or at least they were. Now, after the patch, they're small, a fraction of their former size. They're diminuitive, tiny, and a paltry shadow of what they should be. They're-- dare I say it-- puny and pathetic. We are male Orcs! Like Thrall, we are the real heroes of Warcraft. We're the ones who rage into battle at a moment's notice. If anyone deserves gigantic shoulders, it's us. We are true heroes, sung and unsung-- we are Orc males, and our shoulders must be large, majestic, and befitting of our muscular stature. Blizzard has acknowledged the bug, sure, and they say it'll be fixed in the next major patch.

But this-- this, my friends, is a true injustice. The next time you see your favorite male Orc, don't make jokes about whether size matters or not. Resist the urge to mention "shrinkage." We are our shoulders, their size, their width, their girth-- when they suffer, we suffer as well.

[ Thanks to all who sent this in-- I feel your pain, my brethren! ]

As you might imagine, we here at WoW Insider love World of Warcraft. It's the greatest thing to come along since at least Diablo. Blizzard is a great company, and when it comes to computer gaming, you could solidly make the argument that nobody does it better than they do.

But when PC World announced their "Most Important People on the Web" list today, I was surprised to see, right there in between the inventor of Bittorrent and Jimbo Wales of Wikipedia, Mike Morhaime, President of Blizzard Entertainment as the 4th Most Important Person on the Internet (a big jump up from a previous list). PC World cites WoW's huge player base and Blizzard's profits of $1.5 billion a year (not to mention all the money floating around WoW's black market services), but does the president of a videogame company really deserve to be two slots down from Steve Jobs, in between the man who basically created an anonymous peer-to-peer sharing system and the man who's developing the definitive online collection of knowledge?

Call me cynical, but I say no. WoW may have influence over a lot of people, but Blizzard is using that influence to nerf druids and tweak raid bosses, not affect the Internet population. Then again, the guy did appear in animated form on South Park, and Jimbo Wales has never done that. We should all know by now that these lists are just a cheap way of encouraging discussion (and attention), but Morhaime's inclusion on the list means that WoW's ascent into our culture isn't done yet.